UX: Getting the climax right

The power of social networks

At Riff Raff, we leverage social networks like Facebook and Twitter for our clients all the time, taking advantage of their incredible reach to carry marketing messages and drive huge volumes of traffic, but it's not often that we get around to wielding their immense power for our own objectives.

We've been riipped off!!

That's not a typo! I was stunned this morning to discover that, after less than two weeks of going live, the Riff Raff website had already been ripped off by copycats! Our designers invested a great deal of time and effort conceptualising and creating a set of bespoke illustrations for our website, and lo and behold, another 'agency' decided to help themselves to our hard work and creativity.

They even made a laughable attempt to disguise the theft, by tweaking the colours and squashing it up slightly

The Original and Best

I guess we should be flattered!

Finding the right tones of voice

In marketing, we often hear the phrase "Tone of Voice" used to describe how a brand communicates with its audience. It's usually used as a way of defining the character of a brand in written or spoken language, and expressed as a combination of simple adjectives like "authoritative", "approachable" and "informal", and there is often only a single tone of voice dominating the entire space. But in these days of sophisticated customer experience, we need to be a little smarter about how we define our Tones of Voice (yes, plural) to communicate a more targeted message.

Blyth at Sunrise

The sky was grey and colourless this morning, but this looks nice in monochrome. It’s just a shame about the burnt-out sun. I wish I could blur out the sea like this, but keep the crisp detail in the clouds!

Click on the photo to see it full-size, or buy a print (from only £1.51)

EXIF: 50mm : f/16.0 : 46sec : Canon EOS 5D Mark II : Carl Zeiss Planar T* 50mm f/1.4 : Lee 0.9 ND Hard Grad : Lee 0.9 ND Soft Grad : Lee Big Stopper

Web design & development jobs in the North East

We're looking for a PHP Developer, User Experience Designer and Technical Project Manager to join our growing interactive team, designing and developing scalable websites and web applications for a range of clients across the UK, covering everything from bespoke E-commerce and Content Management Solutions to Social Networking and On-demand TV Platforms across desktop, set-top and mobile devices.

Project Canvas: Project Clunky

I was privileged to be a part of the Future Tech 2010 Conference in Media City, Salford on Wednesday, surrounded by a broad cross-section of digital media and technology types, exploring the exciting new projects and initiatives launching across the North West over the next 12 months.

Excellent Customer Service

I recently bought a 100mm Lee filter system for my DSLR. It’s not cheap, but is extremely flexible and offers an excellent upgrade path, allowing you to use the filters with any lens, no matter what diameter the filter ring is. The latest filter in my collection was the Big Stopper; a 10-stop Neutral Density filter for taking long exposures in broad day light.

After taking a bunch of pictures with it, I wasn’t impressed. I was getting a horrible red cast over the image that looked unnatural even after correcting it in Aperture. I called Lee to ask them what could be happening; I had no idea if the filter itself was faulty, or if I was just using it incorrectly.

Lee’s customer service department told me that 90% of issues like this are caused by the photographer using the filter incorrectly, but told me to send it to them anyway so that they could run some tests on it for my piece of mind. As it turned out, the filter was perfectly fine, and it was a clear case of PEBKAC* on my part.

What impressed me most was, even though it was obvious to Lee that I was the major flaw in the filter’s design, they still tested it and sent it back to me at their own cost, just to make me feel better about it!

PEBKAC is an acronym used by IT people, and stands for Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair!

What were Apple thinking?

A murmur of amusement and disbelief swept across the office like a Mexican wave last week, as one of our designers upgraded to iTunes 10, with most of the Riff Raff team huddled behind his monitor. "You've got to see this" he said.

Blyth at Sunrise

A first experiment with my new Lee Big Stopper 10-stop ND Filter. I’m getting a weird red cast, which is pretty annoying. Just as well this works in monochrome!

Click on the photo to see it full-size, or buy a print (from only £1.51)

EXIF: 50mm : f/16.0 : 60sec : Canon EOS 5D Mark II : Carl Zeiss Planar T* 50mm f/1.4 : Lee 0.9 ND Hard Grad : Lee 0.9 ND Soft Grad : Lee Big Stopper